Five shot dead at Hotel Bilas Inn in Guwahati; accused arrested within an hour, lease dispute under probe

Early reports said that four had died, and the toll rose to five as the injured person succumbed. One outlet's headline gave a higher number, so the figure was not settled in the first hours. The police have not released the names of the dead, though a hospital official identified one of them as a man of about 48. According to reports, four of the dead were from the family of the hotel's owner, and the fifth, like the injured person, was from the owner's village.

The accused and the weapon

Police Commissioner Partha Sarathi Mahanta said that the culprits would be nabbed promptly, and then said that the main accused had been arrested within an hour. He described Gogoi as not being a hired assailant. The police have named him and say that a licensed .32 bore pistol was seized.

The commissioner said that the incident appears to have resulted from a property dispute related to the lease agreement between the owner's side and the person who held the lease. The police said they knew of no earlier First Information Report in connection with the dispute, which suggests that it had not been taken to the police before. They described the investigation as preliminary and said a scientific investigation, which includes forensic examination of the weapon and the scene, is under way.

What is not yet known

Many details are still unclear. The reports do not say how the accused came to be in the hotel with the pistol, whether there was a quarrel before the shooting, or whether others were with him. They do not say how many shots were fired, and nothing has been reported about the condition of the sixth victim beyond the fact that treatment is going on. There has been no statement from the Assam government in the reports available, and the CCTV footage, if any, has not been mentioned.

A report names the hotel owner and her son among those killed, but the identifications come from different outlets and have not been confirmed in an official list, so they should be treated as provisional until the police release the names.

The use of a licensed pistol in a dispute over property raises a familiar question. A licence for a firearm is granted for personal protection and has to be renewed, and a licence holder who commits a crime with the weapon faces action against the licence as well as a criminal case. The police will want to know how the accused obtained the licence and whether the authorities had any complaints against him.

Lease and property disputes are a common source of violence in cities where land values are high and agreements are sometimes informal. Many of them end in civil suits, and it is rare for them to end in murder. The case will turn on the evidence of what passed between the two sides in the weeks before the shooting, and on the statements of the survivors.

The accused will be produced before a court, and the police are expected to seek his custody to question him and to recover any other material. The post-mortem examinations will give the cause of death of each victim, and the forensic report on the pistol will show whether it was the weapon used in all the shootings. The families of the victims will be waiting for the names to be made official and for the police to say what led to the killings.

Residents of the area and the hotel's staff and guests are likely to be questioned as witnesses. For the city, the shooting has raised fresh concern about the use of firearms in private quarrels.